Below is the review:
A Very Principled
Boy: The Life of Duncan
Lee, Red Spy and Cold Warrior
By Mark A.
Bradley
Basic Books. 333 pages.
$34.50
Reviewed by Joseph
C. Goulden
One of the best espionage books to
cross this desk in years, A Very
Principled Boy also poses a psychological mystery: What demons haunted the brilliant mind of
Duncan C. Lee, a Rhodes Scholar and Yale-educated attorney who went from a top
Wall Street law firm to the inner-circle of the Office of Strategic Services
during World War Two. There he spied for
the Soviets while working at the right hand of OSS director William
Donovan.
Not until after the war ended did
investigators uncover this secret part of Lee’s life. His contact with Soviet
intelligence was through one of the more notorious figures in the “spy era” of
the 1940s, Elizabeth Bentley, a member of the Communist Party USA who acted as a
courier for the Soviet NKGB, predecessor to the KGB. She broke with the Soviets
in November 1945 and named Lee, among dozens of other persons in the government,
as witting sources of secrets she passed to the
Soviets.
But Bentley lacked any hard evidence
– documents or the like – to back her accusations. Lee wisely refused to take any papers out of
the OSS office. Instead, he would commit key memos to his attentive memory – he
boasted of an IQ in the 170s – and relate the information orally to Bentley at
his apartment in the3000 block of Dent Place NW in Georgetown.
Another Soviet spy of the era, Alger Hiss of the State Department, was not so cautious. He gave reams of documents to his underground contact, Whittaker Chambers - evidence that resulted in his conviction and imprisonment for perjury
Once the first evidence of his NKVD
link emerged, Lee performed a deft political flip-flop. Working for the renowned Thomas “Tommy the
Cork” Corcoran, he played a seminal role in creating Air America, the CIA
proprietary airline that played an important role in many covert Cold War
operations.
Mark A. Bradley, a former CIA
intelligence officer who is now a lawyer with the Department of Justice,
performs a masterful job of exploring the tangled and confusing life of
Lee. And he surveys the definitive
smoking-gun proof of Lee’s guilt that the government possessed in the 1940s and
1950s but could not use without revealing our ability to decipher Soviet
intelligence cables to Moscow.
He also makes
skilled use of Soviet intelligence documents snuggled out of Russia by historian
Alexander Vassiliev several years ago.
Lee boasted of a distinguished
lineage. Two of his ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence. Another
kinsman was Confederate General Robert E. Lee. His strongly religious parents
were serving as missionaries in China
when Lee was born.
The several sides
of Lee began to emerge during his student days . Walter Pforzheimer, a Yale classmate (and later a founding father of CIA)
asserted that as an undergraduate, Lee
“always screwed more than a silkworm.” He was a chronic philanderer even when
married with five children. His seemingly endless string of bedmates included a woman who was
both a Soviet espionage courier and a secretary to columnist Walter Lippmann.
At Oxford, Lee
made two discoveries. He courted, and wed, a lissome – and very leftist --
Scottish woman named Ishbel Gibbs, who shared his views on sexual freedom.
Perhaps because of her influence, he made a reappraisal of religion. He stunned his parents by
writing, “I find the Communist Party a fear nearer embodiment of what I regard
as genuine Christianity than any organized church.” Further, he planned to join the party’s
secret underground. Not doing so, he asserted, would force him into “ineffectual
armchair pinkness,” which would be
cowardly. According to NKVD documents unearthed recently, he and Ishbel joined
the Communist Party in 1939.
The same year,
after he finished Yale Law School, Lee went to work for Donovan Leisure, a
prestigious Wall Street law firm headed by Donovan, who in a few years would be
his boss at OSS. Here again, Lee had serious second thoughts. He worried that it
would find it difficult to reconcile his dreams of working for what he called
the “cause” and practicing in Wall Street. As he wrote his mother, “I am haunted
by the specter of the Babbit-brained lawyer and all he stands
for.”
When the war
began, he entered the military and eagerly followed Donovan to Washington. He
was assigned to a secretariat responsible for handling incoming
reports.
Lee’s importance to the Soviets is
revealed in a Soviet document dated September 8, 1942, which boasts of a source,
code name “Kokh,” in the OSS. The cable states that “agent reports from Europe
and all over the world go through him. He chooses among them and shows them to
Donovan for his consideration.”
Unfortunately, U.
S. code breakers could not decipher the cable and identify “Kokh.” for several
more years; hence Lee went undetected.
But his secret world began to
crumble in the autumn of 1945 when Elizabeth Bentley broke with the communists
and gave the first of a series of statements to the FBI. She related the same
charges in testimony to Congress and grand juries.
Although her targets – and
especially Lee – denounced her as
deluded, even crazy, history proved her to be on-target. As Bradley writes,
“Twenty-nine Americans she named as Soviet spies appeared in the NKGB’s
intercepted traffic. One of them was Duncan Lee.”
In his testimony, Duncan admitted to
knowing Bentley, but only casually, and not as a spy. He denied they ever discussed OSS affairs. He
said much the same before a grand jury, which declined to indict him. Not until
1995 did the intelligence community release the intercepted Soviet cables from
the 1940s clearly branding Lee as a spy.
By then, of course, Lee was dead.
But Lee’s problem in the late 1940s
was that he bore the stigma of “spy,” the lack of prosecution notwithstanding.
In what Bradley rightly describes as an opportunistic maneuver, Lee aligned
himself with the famed Washington insider, Corcoran, a fierce Cold Warrior and a
prominent member of the so-called “China Lobby” working to protect the
struggling Nationalist Chinese government.
Corcoran – and
through him, Lee – worked closely with Col. Claire Chennault, who during the war created the famed “Flying Tigers,”
air arm of the Nationalist military. Lee did much of the
legal work that in effect privatized the
air operations, which then flew both
military and commercial cargoes in China. When communist forces ousted the
Nationalists in 1947, Mao Tse-Tung laid claim to 83 planes that had been moved to Hong Kong, calling
them the “sacred property of the People’s Republic of
China.”
Chennault and partner Whiting
Willauer warned that Mao would use the air fleet for a paratroop assaults on
Taiwan. They also struck a deal with the Nationalists to buy the planes. Lee did the paperwork. He worked “almost
exclusive” on recovering the planes from 1949 t0 1952. When money ran short, the
CIA opened its coffers – an association that eventually marked the birth of Air
America, which thereafter was a proprietary
company.
The Red Chinese fought back in the
Hong Kong courts, and they won nine times. But the Privy Council in London,
Britain’s highest court, ultimately upheld as legal the contracts drafted by
Lee. As Willauer later wrote “The
importance to the [anti]-Communist cause of obtaining these airlines cannot be
over-exaggerated.”
But as Bradley asserts, Lee acted
for motives other than patriotism. “To
keep J. Edgar Hoover’s agents from knocking on his front door or the HUAC’s
investigators from slapping another subpoena into his hands, Lee had cloaked
himself in the mantle of anticommunism and surrounded himself with men with
unassailable anticommunist credentials….As importantly, it had allowed him to
dry-clean his conscience. Perhaps Lee believed, if his father was right about a
forgiving God, he had finally broken even.”
But given the U.
S. wartime alliance with the Soviets, did the stolen secrets really do any
harm? Bradley’s answer is an emphatic
“yes.” As he writes, “his intelligence
alerted the Soviets to British and American diplomatic strategies for
negotiating with Stalin over postwar Poland’s borders and the United States’
diplomatic activities in Romania and Bulgaria, especially with those nations’
pro-Western politicians, who were in great danger once they found themselves
behind the Iron Curtain.”
Soviet penetration made an open book of the
OSS. “It gave the Kremlin a clear look into the previously obscure activities of
the foreign intelligence service of its most important wartime ally. As John le Care observed, an intelligence
service discloses its own ignorance when it reveals its targets.” The exposure extended to the CIA when it was
formed in 1947, given that it drew heavily on the OSS for manpower and
operational techniques.
Lee spent his last
years working abroad for an international insurance company. Wife Ishbel tired
of his constant affairs and divorced him (and married a man seventeen years her
junior).
Lee protested his innocence to the
end, writing for his sons a “memoir” that tied to explain away the charges
against him. In the end, even his sons were unconvinced of his innocence. The
family gave Bradley documents which he uses in the book.
Lee sought relief
in heavy drinking. He died in 1988. Perhaps his only solace was that Donovan
never denounced him, commenting only that he was a “very principled boy.”
Classify this as a
five-cloak, five-dagger read.
A Chinese language
edition of Joe Goulden’s 1982 book, Korea: The Untold Story of the War, is being
published this summer by Bejiing Xiron Books.
Note: I interviewed Joseph C. Goulden for Counterterrorism & Homeland Security magazine a while back. You can read the interview via the below link:
